Mobile Application Purchase: Comparison of Utilitarian Features between Users and Non-users

This study aims to understand how utilitarian features of a mobile application moderate purchase motivations and intentions among users and non-users. Taking a case of cinema ticket purchase in the Iranian context, this study has collected empirical data through a questionnaire from 240 respondents. Multiple regression analysis was used to analyze data. Motivational variables were grouped into four groups: functional motivations, convenience-based functional motivations, product motivations, and service motivations. In addition, the gender issue of the consumer was also considered. This study finds that such motivational factors significantly affect consumers’ motivations, both male and female consumers. Analysis on gender shows no significant differences among male and female consumers. Therefore, these factors should be considered in formulating marketing communication strategy and media management, especially for non-users. Further research should consider other motivational factors, such as hedonic motivations, attitude, and situational factors, to understand consumer behaviors comprehensively. Keywords: marketing communication, mobile application, mobile purchase, utilitarian features, mobile marketing, cinema ticket.

THE EFFECT OF SNS USERS’ MOTIVATION ON INTERACTION AND PERFORMANCE

This research examines that proposed social, emotional and functional motivations influence users to interact with other users on SNS, share various information, establish networks and improve communication with acquaintances. It allows users to easily grasp the structure of the content and provide a conveniently accessible and stable interface. Moreover, in the relationship between SNS user interaction and user performance, it was found that only user-to-system interaction has a significant impact on user performance. Such research results provide a theoretical background on how SNS users interact with motivation factors. These research findings provide other researchers with insights for future studies and can be critically utilized by practitioners to increase performance by considering SNS use motivation and users' interaction.

Expression of anaphoric subjects in Vera'a: Functional and structural factors in the choice between pronoun and zero

The choice between a pronoun and zero anaphor for the expression of third-person subjects is examined in a corpus of Vera'a (Oceanic). While predominantly expressed by a pronoun, subjects are found to permit zero form with referents that have low anaphoric distance. Within this context, zero is found to be preferred with a subset of verbal predicates that take a specific tense-aspect-mood-polarity (TAMP) marker that historically retains subject agreement. The strong preference for pronouns is related to the clitic behavior of adjacent TAMP morphology and the rudimentarity of agreement. Animacy and number also bear on subject variation. Effects of clause-combining and the use of connectives do not align with findings from studies of the same choice in other languages. Our findings underscore the prominent role of purely structural over functional motivations for the choice of pronouns over zero.

‘Fifty pounds will buy me a pair of horses for my carriage’: the history of permissive subjects in English

This article investigates the history of so-called permissive subjects in English, for example The tent sleeps four: inanimate, non-agentive subjects used with verbs that normally take animate, agentive subjects. Although permissive subjects are assumed in the literature to be innovations, there is little information available on their use and frequency. Using historical corpora, I provide an account of the history of permissive subjects with five verbs – see, buy, seat, sleep and sell. The results show that permissive subjects with see and buy are already found in the sixteenth century, while those with seat and sell occur from the nineteenth century onwards, and those with sleep first occur in the twentieth century. The five types also differ in other respects, with genre and functional motivations playing an important role. Crucially, there is an increase in the overall use of these permissive subjects, which follows the increase in subject-initial clauses and a more marked use of the presubject position as described by Los & Dreschler (2012), supporting their proposal that several subject-creating strategies – passives, middles and permissive subjects – became more frequent in English due to changes in the pragmatic character of the clause-initial position, in turn caused by the loss of verb second.

Gardeners’ Past Gardening Experience and Its Moderating Effect on Community Garden Participation

Studies on participation in community gardens have revealed that gardeners’ participation is driven by functional and emotional motives. Most studies, however, have failed to recognize gardeners’ diverse characteristics. To fill this research gap, this study examined the moderating effect that variations within gardeners has on their participation, particularly as in the case of past gardening experience. The data for this study were obtained through a survey administered in three plot-based community gardens in Austin, Texas. Results revealed that increased gardening experience bolsters the effect of emotional motivations on garden participation, while no effect was shown in the relationship between functional motivations and participation. The importance of gardeners’ past gardening experience on emotional motivations is discussed as it relates to sustained participation in gardening.

The Regulation of Genetically Modified Organisms on a Local Level: Exploring the Determinants of Cultivation Bans

This study investigates municipalities’ regulatory activities in the field of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) for agricultural use. To explore the determinants of these activities, the case of Germany was selected as in this country, municipalities have legal possibilities to impose local GMO cultivation bans. Using data from 131 local council resolutions, the combination of qualitative and quantitative content analysis shows that, in most cases, no single factors, but a variety of factors lead to regulatory activity. The study reveals that functional motivations to prevent negative socio-economic effects or impacts on the environment or human health are decisive for municipalities’ decisions to regulate. Furthermore, the results of the quantitative analysis unveil that municipalities often refer to both socio-economic reasons and risks for the environment and human health when justifying their decisions. Moreover, the results indicate that local policymakers impose popular cultivation bans to promote their own political success. Finally, the horizontal diffusion of regulations between municipalities, but also vertical diffusion from higher political levels can be observed. Overall, the results of this study on GMOs on a local level further emphasize the importance of analyzing the interdependencies between agroecosystems and socio-economic systems in their full complexity.

Morpho-syntactic variations in English and Spanish clipped words: a contrastive study

Clipping and linguistic variation are inexorably interconnected. Shortened or elliptical words reflect a great deal of variability of the language, especially in the morphological and phonological levels. The object of this study is precisely to explore the phono-graphemic and grammatical variations occurred in the visible changes undergone by clipped words in Spanish and English. A contrastive analysis of this type reveals both expectedly different correspondences in terms of gender and number, and surprisingly parallel lexico-syntactic features. This suggests that clipped or elliptical units are not only necessarily dependent on intrinsic morpho-grammatical and phonological traits, but they are also characterized by regularities and universal patterns that might show disruptive or “corrupted” constructs. This analysis confirms the peculiarities of clipping and linguistic variations in both languages, in an attempt to comprehend the interconnection between functional motivations, and morphological and phonological changes.